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	Can the Internet Save Itself? by Laleh Ispahani & Chancellar Williams Agencies   The open internet is an essential condition of full and equal participation in the public sphere.   Today is the day the internet could determine its future. Because today, September 10, is the day digital-rights groups, internet companies, and activists unite to protect net neutrality by demonstrating what the web would look like if broadband providers favored some kinds of content over others.   Net neutrality is the principle that ensures all internet content is treated the same. This means internet service providers (ISPs)—companies like Comcast or Verizon—must treat all data on the internet equally, and not discriminate or charge differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, or mode of communication.   The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down net neutrality rules earlier this year. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler took the opportunity to propose rules that would create an internet fast lane—allowing ISPs to charge some companies higher fees for faster access to consumers, effectively slowing all other internet traffic. Creating such a tiered system is the opposite of net neutrality, which is favored by the vast majority of internet users.   Advocates have been pressuring the FCC to abandon Chairman Wheeler’s flawed proposal for months, and their efforts are bearing fruit. The FCC has to date received over one million comments on the open internet, the vast majority of them in support of strong net neutrality rules. On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver lampooned Chairman Wheeler’s proposal, a segment that generated so much interest in the issue that the FCC’s web site crashed twice.   And Washington, D.C., is beginning to sit up and take note. Over 60 members of Congress, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, have spoken out in support of strong net neutrality rules. President Obama has also addressed the issue, explaining that “the position of my administration … is you don’t want to start getting a differentiation in how accessible the internet is for various users.”   Advocates are turning up the heat with the September 10 online protest. They are staging an “internet slowdown,” a symbolic protest where participating web sites will display an “infinitely loading site icon,” to demonstrate what the web would look like without net neutrality. The loading icon won’t actually slow internet access, but it will include a prompt to contact Congress and the FCC in support of net neutrality.   The leading organizers—groups like Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, and Free Press—are veterans of the successful online action to stop SOPA (the Stop Online Privacy Act) and PIPA (the Protect IP Act), legislation that would have allowed internet censorship.   The open internet is an essential condition of full and equal participation in the public sphere. It facilitates information flow, transforming institutions and communities themselves along the way. That is why organizations ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to Color of Change will be participating in the protest, and it is why major internet companies like Etsy and Netflix have decided to join the fight.   September 10 represents an opportunity for advocates of net neutrality that promises to bring new energy and attention to the issue. It is also the result of many years of work by a dedicated and diverse field that is collaborating smartly to realize this common, critical goal.   http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/can-internet-save-itself http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/voices http://www.battleforthenet.com/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/ http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/15/internet-surveillance-report-edward-snowden-leaks http://www.ohchr.org/EN/issues/Terrorism/Pages/SRTerrorismIndex.aspx Visit the related web page
	Governments that are more open and accountable to their citizens have better development outcomes by Harvard, Transparency International, agencies   The Responsive City - Civic Data, by Susan Crawford. (Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard)   Last week, the UN reported that more than half of humanity now lives in cities; by 2050 two-thirds of people will, up from just 30% in 1950.   Given the grave challenges facing the world"s booming urban areas—including global warming, economic dislocation, and crumbling basic infrastructure, among other torments—tomorrow"s mayors will need to take bold steps to ensure their constituents live in dignity and safety.   But public distrust of dysfunctional, faceless government is profound, resources are limited, gaps between groups are widening, and many are unaware of the role of government in their lives—which makes citizens less likely to support major initiatives.   One way to fill the drained reservoir of public trust in municipal government is to make city hall more visibly—and continuously—responsive. Digital technology can help: by using data to optimize the use of limited city resources and communicate clearly (with a friendly voice) across a range of platforms, a city can make life noticeably better for its citizens.   The hard question is whether cities will use data to make genuine citizen and neighborhood engagement—affecting policy decisions and the allocation of resources, and potentially solving some problems altogether—possible. So far, cities in America are being cautious. There is much more that could be done.   A few weekends ago, at a "Civic Academy" put on by the City of Boston"s Department of Information Technology aimed at training neighborhood groups to use social media tools, Mayor Marty Walsh stepped to the microphone in a short-sleeved shirt to provide some energetic cheerleading: "We want to make sure we"re using every channel available" to reach constituents, he said—including every flavor of social platform, from Tumblr to Twitter to Instagram. (This is a link to a list of every social channel maintained by Boston.) What"s great about Boston"s training sessions, taking place in the city"s new District Hall innovation space in South Boston, is that their goal is to help neighborhoods help themselves--not just publicity for city initiatives.   Communicating by way of social media is both easy and helpful. Boston"s tireless tweeting following the Marathon bombing of last year and during the endless snowstorms of this past winter unquestionably made an enormous difference to Bostonians and others anxious for news. Boston is not alone in its creative use of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. New York City has more than 300 social media channels, and the City of Chicago is not far behind. Many cities collect and analyze geolocated public tweets to help them get ahead of urban issues; when people Tweet about train delays or noises, the city can listen.   When it comes to policy decisions, however, digital technology is mostly being used to announce rather than construct. The City of Palo Alto lets anyone access, visualize, and share its budget and financial information by way of its OpenGov Platform. Houston hosts an online Budget Bootcamp that decodes city budget lingo, and many cities ensure that their budget figures are easily available online.   Participatory budgeting, in which citizens have a hand in allocating resources, has both a long history in Brazil and the support of the White House but has been slow to emerge in U.S. cities. In New York City, residents of ten participating city council districts voted earlier this year on how to spend about $14 million of capital funds. Similarly small experiments in Chicago and San Francisco, as well as a recent youth-oriented effort in Boston, have not had a significant effect on policy.   Just as engineers need to build buildings that don"t fall down, we need to construct public institutions that won"t crumble. It is now possible for cities to use screens, data, and handheld devices to help neighborhoods be visible to themselves—what are the issues? where are the resources?—and allow citizens to organize in ways that will provide dignified, useful assistance to one another and, in partnership, to the city as a whole.   All the best-intentioned tweets in the world won"t substitute for finding a way to authentically harness and respond to civic energy. Governments are part of neighborhoods and aren"t moving; getting people used to working together this way is essential.   http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/news/article/how-city-halls-can-help-construct-stronger-neighborhoods-517 http://datasmart.ash.harvard.edu/responsivecity http://www.makingallvoicescount.org/   Madrid, 28 September 2014   On the occasion of International Right to Know Day, Helen Darbishire, Executive Director of Access Info Europe, argues that the European Union should be taking a strong lead on transparency standards across the 28 country region of 500 million inhabitants.   With 751 new members of the European Parliament getting settled into their offices in Brussels, and with the new European Commission – the ministers of the Union – about to be appointed, civil society is demanding a strong transparency agenda in which the EU takes the lead and sets standards to be followed by all its 28 Member States.   The latest figures from the AsktheEU.org request platform, which was launched on International Right to Know Day 2011, gives a rate of 58% for full or partial information release (of which 36% is complete information provided). Actual formal refusals across the EU institutions are low at 8% and in data held specifically on the Council of the EU and the Parliament from 2013, only one request to each institution resulted in administrative silence.   These numbers could certainly be improved and doing so should be a priority for the new Commission. Attention should also be paid to the story behind the numbers: many of the documents which are not being released, and in some cases not even being created, are those needed by the European public to follow decision making and to hold the EU institutions to account.   This means that civil society is having to fight to get access to basic decision-making documents. In October 2013 the European Court of Justice granted Access Info Europe access to a document containing the positions of Member States in negotiations over the EU’s transparency rules. It is both remarkable and unacceptable that it took a 5-year legal battle to secure public access to such a document.   A current area of concern is the negotiation with the United States of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will govern future rules affecting areas such as the quality of food, consumer protection, and chemicals safety. Much information has been exempted from the reach of the EU’s transparency rules on the grounds that it is an international negotiation; the United States for all its history of Freedom of Information does also not seem particularly keen on permitting the European public to be informed about what is, in effect, a future regulatory framework for European laws.   In July 2014, the European Ombudsman opened an investigation into the European Commission and the Council of the EU for lack of transparency around the TTIP talks and even before concluding this called for publication of the negotiating directives and a range of practical measures to enable timely public access to TTIP documents, as well as to details of meetings with stakeholders, which includes the involvement of the business lobby which has been given privileged access to some documents.   One of the most shocking cases in 2014 has been the refusal of the European Commission to reveal details of spending on travel and hospitality by the outgoing commissioners. This is the kind of refusal which fuels suspicion of wrong-doing and abuse in Brussels, even if it is unjustified.   In Access Info Europe’s opinion polling, 86% of the public across six countries wanted to know how the EU is spending the money which comes from their tax contributions, and it’s a legitimate ask. The public knows that such secrecy is unacceptable by 21st Century standards of an open, democratic society.   Interestingly but not surprisingly, the public is also very concerned about the way the financial crisis is being handled, with 84% of the public demanding to know more about how the European Central Bank has taken decisions relating to the crisis, something which it resisted sharing documents on, including for example what it knew about the true state of finances in Greece in the run up to that country’s financial collapse (Greece also being a country which is very weak on transparency).   With Europe facing a crisis of confidence, as underscored by record low turnout in this year"s European elections (42.5%), a lot of work must be done to get closer to the public, and opening up basic decision-making and spending documents is clearly one of them.   Greater openness is not just clever politics, it’s a legal requirement of the EU treaties which require that EU bodies “shall conduct their work as openly as possible” and that “decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen.”   Hence, the incoming Parliament and Commission should make transparency a priority of and should put a strong focus on making the existing rules work in practice.   http://www.access-info.org/es/union-europea/614-rtkd-leadership-europe   19 August 2014   Civil society organizations call for healthy debate on the independence and transparency of official scientific policy advice in the EU.   27 organizations have sent a letter to the new head of the EU Commission reiterating a call for healthy debate on how scientific policy advice is structured in the EU.   In particular, the letter asks the new president of the Commission to put an end to the position of Chief Scientific Adviser to the Commission as currently structured. Civil society has serious concerns that the position concentrates too much influence on one person, and that it operates in total secrecy.   The current position holder has stated that her advice should remain "not transparent” and immune from public scrutiny. The position goes against the principle of ensuring that scientific advice upon which policy decisions are based is independent, balanced, and transparent.   "At a time when scientific opinion is central to EU policy making and legislative processes, the idea of a single person secretly advising the Commission on all science related matters, from climate change, to toxic chemicals, GMOs, fracking and fisheries, is not only unscientific, it is also in direct contradiction to the democratic process enshrined by the European Union," says David Azoulay, Senior Attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).   "It is critical that EU lawmakers have access to the best representation of wide-ranging and transparent scientific advice to carry out their work; asking one single person to secretly determine what science ‘is’ on a subject is a grave mistake.”   http://www.ciel.org/Chem/EC_Science_19Aug2014.html   Good governance: end poverty now. (Transparency International)   The world is to set global priorities that will chart the course on how all countries work to end poverty by 2030. This is no easy task.   It was tried in 2000 when global leaders made eight development promises to be reached by 2015, known as the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). With a year left, only four of the MDG targets have been achieved.   Good governance and anti-corruption were not included in the first list. They should be now.   Transparency International research in more than 100 countries shows how bribery and poor governance have undermined achieving the current MDGs.   The level of corruption in any given country has a direct and significant correlation with that country’s development. For example, in countries where more than 60 per cent of people report paying a bribe, almost five times more people live on less than US$1 a day than in countries where less than 30 per cent of the population reports paying bribes.   Governments that are more open and accountable to their citizens have better development outcomes across the board, regardless of whether a country is richer or poorer. Visit the link below for more details. Visit the related web page
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